Ready Steady Eddy

[EddyCurrent]

I did a daft thing yesterday and tried to knee jerk my out of it but I knew it was no good and laid awake from 6am this morning thinking what to do, anyway it's back on track now.

I thought it would be a good idea to mill two grooves for the Z axis rails to sit in, maybe 0.5mm deep so using my wood router I set about it with a 6mm cutter. After installing the rails and sliding the assembly into the bearing blocks it was tight, noisy, juddering. So further investigation revealed the two grooves were not flat and the rails were leaning outward a bit, now this is where the knee jerk bit started, I put epoxy putty on the back of two of the bearing blocks and bolted it back up, it was better but not perfect. Anyway after thinking about it this morning I decided to route the grooves again but this time using one large cutter and it worked great, it took two goes to skim it but the results are so good there is virtually no resistance when sliding the front plate along. It meant though that I needed 1mm shims under the bearing blocks due to the extra depth I had to take out of the rail grooves but that worked out fine. There is a slight gap each side of the rails due to the grooves being slightly wider however I will run a bit of epoxy into those gaps and that should keep the rails nicely in place.
I'll have to divert onto another bit now as I'm waiting for the Z axis ball nut to arrive from China.

Extra hole in rail = broken tap in orignal.


clamps are to stop front plate dropping out of the bearings and loosing my balls.